Young Experimenters

To accelerate our transition to a clean energy system, we need better policy design and better engineering design. The latter requires a greater pool of passionate and skilled engineers, something the U.S. is sorely lacking (particularly as we near mass retirement of experienced engineers). Douglas Marriott wrote in to the magazine Mechanical Engineering to discuss his experience teaching engineering students:

“I found the most promising students were the farm boys, people who knew before they came to college how many sides there are to a hex nut. It is always easier to teach math to someone with a mechanical aptitude than to teach mechanical aptitude to a mathematician.”

The proportion of Americans growing up on farms is shrinking, but there are certainly others who grow up developing a mechanical aptitude. It’s my perception that many youth have grand potential as innovators and engineers, but get distracted (video games?) or discouraged somewhere along the way. We can do a better job encouraging youth to consider challenging and rewarding engineering and science careers. As our children are growing up we can do more to cultivate their curiosity for how things are put together and how they work. We might not even need to point out or provide opportunities for them to experiment and explore, just provide them with the time, space, and physical and mental tools they need.

For example, during high school I drove an old Toyota, and at one point it needed a new transmission. My father purchased for me a wrecked Toyota, the same model and year as the one I drove, so that I could salvage the transmission and other parts. He helped where he could with the repairs, making it possible for me to keep going with my ‘experiment’ of learning how to replace a transmission. After the repairs were done, I got curious. I started taking apart the junker car, piece by piece. I wanted to know how cars were really put together. Rather than getting upset at the mess, my parents recognized the value of this experiment. After a few weeks I had the car stripped completely down to its frame. I continued tinkering, experimenting, building, and designing; my passion for solving technical problems continued to grow over the years.

We need more young people who grow up thinking about technical problems (whether fixing cars or fixing our energy system), and dreaming up solutions, so by the time they are in the workplace they can get right to business helping turn things around for us. Important technical problems, like energy use and production, need to become kitchen-table discussion topics. Let’s not shy away from them just because they are technical. These issues affect all of us, and we need to get interested and informed.

Engineers really add value to an economy and improve quality of life for many. We need more creators and innovators right now. What can we do to inspire more people to choose professions like this, even if we are not engineers ourselves?